D1

Introduction

This course teaches ... for the Edexcel GCE AS module D1. Exercise references are for the course companion Decision Mathematics 1^[1]

course outline/calendar

course content

• D1 chapter 1 - algorithms
• D1 chapter 2 - graphs and networks
• D1 chapter 3 - algorithms on networks
• D1 chapter 4 - route inspection (Chinese postman problem)
• D1 chapter 5 - critical path analysis
• D1 chapter 6 - linear programming
• D1 chapter 7 - matchings

revision materials

You just can't overemphasise how important practicing mulitple past papers is to secure A-level success. This graph proves it:

Notice that everyone who did all five practice papers ended up at about 90%.
Notice all but two learners improved.
Notice that the effect was most significant for learners who started with weaker intitial scores.
This isn't particularly surprising research, but being able to see the graph really does bring it home.
Another thing I didn't notice until today is that 5 out of 8 learners that quit early did so after their first drop in score and that 5 out of 8 drops in score resulted in that learner quitting (not quite the same thing). All of those that recovered from a one-off dip continued to the end and finished with that final score of 89% or better. This means that building resilience to disappointment is important and that in the future, as the teacher, I need to invest additional encouragement when I notice a short-term drop in scores to keep the learner going through setbacks.

• revision notes
• solutions to pastpapers:

year	sitting	link
2011	June (May)	not yet available!
2011	January	D1 2011 Jan worked solution.pdf Details Download 3 MB

applications and investment

So why should you invest time in learning this stuff?
Graphs are an increasingly important tool in analysing the massively interconnected world of online communications. The business world has huge opportunities to exploit if they can understand how people connect and what drives their purchasing behaviours. A recent article (28 May 2013) by the venture capitalist NEA explores the difficulties of analysing 'Big Data': Mind the Gap.
For a lovely visual representation of this see the last third of Deb Roy's extraordinary TED talk about language acquisition 'The Birth of a Word.' His analysis of an enormous data set allows him and his reasearch colleagues to tease apart the interactions and modelling that allowed his son to acquire the word 'water' over hundreds of hours of video. In the last section he previews how his team is going on to look an the transmission of ideas in the interconnected digital sphere and it's his use of massive graphs in this that should shout 'D1!' at you. A lovely video. Enjoy:


Here is a lovely visualisation of the huge graph of intereconnectedness that is the internet:
This is part of the Internet Archive's work to create a universal library of the internet over time:

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1. ^ Jameson, S. G. Decision Mathematics 1, (Pearson, 2009). ISBN 978 0 435519 19 3